Biography
Xuxu Song is a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow for 2022-2023 and teaches German in the Department of European Languages and Studies. She received her Ph.D. in German in June 2022. A research stay in Mannheim and Frankfurt on a DAAD doctoral research fellowship and fellowships from the Humanities Center at UC Irvine have supported her work. She will be teaching as Lecturer in the German Department at Princeton University in Spring 2023. Xuxu previously studied German at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and Renmin University of China. She also holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the University of Southern California. She has interpreted for intergovernmental meetings, and her translation has appeared on TELOSscope.
Xuxu’s research and teaching interests center on eighteenth- to twentieth-century German literature and its imbrication with intellectual history; contemporary migration studies in a global context; representations of war; translation studies; and women’s studies. Her dissertation, “A Study of the Athenaeum (1798-1800) as the Early German Romantic Work of Art,” demonstrates that the multi-year, multi-volume, and multi-authored journal is in its own right a paradigmatic artwork of the Jena constellation. She takes a holistic approach to trace this polyphonic, interdisciplinary, and transcultural work of Sympoesie/Symphilosophie by breaking the internal barriers between canonical and lesser-known contributions to the journal and bringing them into dialogue.
Her work is largely motivated by the interest in bringing together “major” and “minor” voices in various kinds of German context. She is currently working on three essays that go into greater detail on lesser-known yet crucial aspects of romantic aesthetic theory and practice. Each explores a different theoretical perspective: women authors around 1800 (“gynocriticism”), romantic nature and ecocriticism, and translation studies. They are united by the question of how noncanonical and marginalized voices in romanticism in Jena and Berlin dynamized the scene of intellectual exchange and co-shaped its central aesthetics in ways that are relevant for crucial discussions of global concern of our day.
Outside of academia, she is an eventing rider of the United States Eventing Association. With a background in public administration and passion about international affairs, she continues to explore issues around geopolitical and economic developments across the globe.